It's really not that big a deal (to me). The ease of use (iTunes,
hardware design, easy cross-platform external storage) makes it up for
me. It'd be nice if they'd do gapless, but I just plain don't really
care. And I had actually thought I'd be too annoyed by it, but I'm
not.
Ogg/FLAC? Don't have any. Well, OK, I have some Oggs from when I went
through my Ogg phase a couple years ago, but I just transcode them to
m4a. In fact, I transcode all my MP3s that are greater than 128k too,
because they get much smaller and I can fit more music on my puny mini.
Sure, Ogg can be small, too, but I think even if every other player
supported Ogg, I'd still go with an iPod for the ease of use and
iTunes. Until the competitors' software was as good as it. As of now,
I don't think there's anybody that matches iTunes for goodness.
The Rio Karma seems like one of the best of the competitors, but it
lacks too much, if you ask me. The complaints you mention are
deal-breakers for me, and I'd add the interface design as being pretty
lacking, too.
That all being said, I'd love for somebody to release a real valid
competitor to the iPod just so Apple has some good competition. The
key is matching iTunes, and making file transfers easy. And probably
the click-wheel at this point... seems the only way to go. Aside from
"style", I think those are the real reasons people buy the iPod.
-adamp
On Oct 25, 2004, at 5:49 PM, Shane Huddleston wrote:
quoted 22 lines How do all the iPod fans tolerate the lack of gapless playback? I> How do all the iPod fans tolerate the lack of gapless playback? I
> consider iPods to be broken out of the box for that reason alone and
> simply couldn't use one without throwing it out the bus window within
> 5 or 10 minutes. Or, has Apple fixed that recently?
>
> My money's on the Rio Karma. It has it's flaws (doesn't everything)
> but has perfect gapless playback for MP3 and WMA and fully supports
> all features of OGG and FLAC formats. Also cool is that the docking
> station supports ethernet so you can just pop your player on any
> standing network and access from any machine.
>
> Complaints: can't mount it as a drive in Windows Explorer (or
> OSX/Linux): non-music file transfers have to be done with proprietary
> RioTaxi software. Also, there's only a 20GB version so far. Something
> bigger is on the way, but probably not until 2005.
>
> -Shane
>
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